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Having gotten the grips on FM12Pro a bit, I am now working on my second project, which should be real easy - so I thought...

It is a simple database of students and applicants for observerships at a university. 1 table only, no relationships.

These people need all kinds of letters, attestations and reports, starting from invitations and stretching all the way to multipage letters of recommendation.

The idea was to not have to retype and reenter names, addresses, DOBs, dates of attendance, etc. over and over again for each document required,

I thought that this should be a perfect and easy task for FM using form letters, but the page layout capabilities of FM12 are pretty limited and the management of multipage layouts is real hard to handle.

Page Setup. I could find no option for selecting different page setups for different layouts and there is no option for a multipage layout.

Page Breaks. I haven't yet found a way to simply insert a page break into the flowing text of a text box, so that printing will simply continue on a new page of the same document. Documentation seems to know about page breaks only in the context of layout parts.

Headers. If I choose "Header" to place an institution letterhead, the letterhead appears on every page of every document, which is pointless with multipage form letters. If I choose "Title Header", the letterhead appears only on the first page of the multipage letter of the first database entry. None of the other database entries has a letterhead on page 1 of a multipage form letter. So only the first applicant would have one, none of the following ones. This makes FM useless (at least in my hands) for such an application.

Footer. If I want a footer on page 1 of a multipage document, I cannot seem to make the text from the body stretch onto page 2 or 3.

So how can I create a multipage form letter design that:

will carry a letterhead and an address on page 1 of each document for each database entry only

can have the body text stretch to page 2 or 3 if needed

can have a footer either on page 1 only or on all pages that will not interfere with 1. and 2. ?

They are helpful and informative, but I was really looking for something simpler and more straightforward than creating an Automator-workflow and to use Indesign in addition to Filemaker.
Even though I can see how doing it that way could be extremely powerful!

The sliding feature helps in certain instances, but didn't solve my issues with headers and footers.

The only way, that I now got FM to do things the way I want them, was to remove both the header and the footer from my document. Then to place the letterhead logo, the address frame, the footer information, etc. inside the document body in normal text boxes.
But despite of having solved my problem, I find this a rather dissapointing workaround for such a powerful piece of software.
The form letter capabilities of FM12 really are underdeveloped in my opinion.